I Think You're Totally Wrong (14 page)

CALEB:
Would you call Obama evil because he's continuing the war in Afghanistan and bombing Libya?

DAVID:
I get it. It's a continuum. But killing for simple political—

CALEB:
There's a difference between willingness to commit collateral damage versus the willingness to target civilians.

DAVID:
And I think this willingness is pretty high with Bush and Cheney.

CALEB:
I'd agree. Still, anyone who thinks Bush is “evil” does so out of political bias.

DAVID:
I'm no Obama or Hillary or Bill fan, if that's what you're saying. People who kill for political gain—

CALEB:
Nothing wrong with cynicism.

CALEB:
Why didn't we just drop a bomb on Mount Fuji?

DAVID:
In '45?

CALEB:
A few people lived in the mountains. Nothing like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We could have sent a message: “We have the bomb. We can waste your cities.” If they
didn't surrender, we could have dropped a bomb on one of their sparsely populated islands, kill a few hundred people, but not seventy thousand. They'd have gotten the message.

DAVID:
You're backforming history.

CALEB:
Here's a genocidal dictator, Saddam Hussein, who killed Kurds and Marsh Arabs. He sent his people to die in an absurd war against Iran—U.S.-backed, I know, but Hussein went too far. People on the far right think it's a closed case. Their reasoning is not completely off. They found chemical weapons. He was saber-rattling, acting as if he had weapons, kicking inspectors out. He'd been given many chances.
Many
chances.

DAVID:
So you actually supported the war?

CALEB:
I thought the cons outweighed the pros, but I did see pros.

DAVID:
We're taking slightly different positions than I thought we would. I would have thought you'd have gotten on your high moral horse about the war. What did you think of Christopher Hitchens's waterboarding article?

CALEB:
A pompous screed. Of course waterboarding is torture, but so is cleaning up vomit, watching
Glee
, or going to Disneyland. He never was in danger.

DAVID:
He's a pussy?

CALEB:
The Taliban take five guys, pick one, make the other four watch as they pull out nails, flay, and decapitate. Then they ask the other four if they'd like to talk. That's torture. Enhanced interrogation? At Guantánamo they made prisoners listen to the Barney theme song.

DAVID:
I love that song.

CALEB:
Van Halen and Metallica and Barney 24/7. Or they'd
take a little meat, vegetables, and potatoes, blend it into a disgusting mush, and serve it. Hitchens's essay would have been a lot different had he written about sitting in a room, listening to Barney, and eating mush. Guantánamo's no resort, but those prisoners play soccer.

At the trailhead
.

CALEB:
(to DVR)
Friday, September 30th, David Shields and Caleb Powell are at the beginning of the trail to Dorothy Lake in the Cascade Mountains. Here's a brief tourism pitch for the state of Washington: Parks and Forestry does a pretty good job maintaining the trails. For thirty bucks you can visit unlimited for a year. The pass generates a lot of revenue for the parks. I think they've sold over 500,000 passes so far. The mountains are gorgeous. According to the sign, Dorothy Lake is a mile and a half away. I think it's longer.

DAVID:
How does anyone know we have the pass?

CALEB:
It's on the rearview mirror. Cars without the pass risk a ticket.… Return to Hitchens and torture and evil.

DAVID:
Hitchens has learned nothing from the history of war. Any war can be defended. “Tyranny.” “Communism.” “Fascism.” Just as I can harm you only as an act of self-defense, a nation ought to fight only when directly threatened. 9/11 wasn't the first strike of an air war. To treat it as such was wrong. My ruling principle is “First do no harm.”

CALEB:
I don't think we should have gone to Iraq. I just think
the pro-war crowd had a valid argument. And Hitler's justification wasn't Churchill's.

DAVID:
I like that moment in
Fahrenheit 9/11
when Michael Moore asks various congressmen if their sons and daughters are serving in Iraq. Am I willing to serve in the armed forces or send Natalie to Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya? Of course not.

CALEB:
Me neither.

DAVID:
Must not be very necessary, then. And that's why World War II was such an interesting case.

CALEB:
I'd have felt compelled to enlist.

DAVID:
I hope I would have, too. At some point philosophical ambiguity becomes moral cowardice.

CALEB:
Thoreau said, “I prefer the philanthropy of Captain [John] Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots nor liberates me.”

DAVID:
Right, but there isn't a country in the world the U.S. should now be at war with.

CALEB:
The only legitimate reason to intervene is for humanitarian reasons, to stop suffering.

DAVID:
Caleb! Can't you hear how double-speak that sounds?

CALEB:
Real life is contradictory.

CALEB:
The hike's up and down all the way, but not too steep. Let me take a picture. In your sunglasses, you look like a spy.

DAVID:
About twenty years ago, I went through a Hitchens phase. I love his long essay on Isaiah Berlin: he shows how Berlin's devotion to ambiguity in literature and philosophy wound up turning him into someone who waffled in real life. He couldn't say no to LBJ and supported the Vietnam War. It's a nice reading of Berlin, and I would take that critique, turn it 180 degrees, and apply it to Hitchens.

CALEB:
Even when he's wrong, he engages the opposition and does his reading. For him to go after Mother Teresa, I'm down with that. I wrote an essay that questioned Rushdie, self-censorship, the media double standard that attacks Christianity but won't defend a Danish cartoonist. Hitchens beat me to it, though—covering the same territory in a piece for the
Nation
. My editor paid me a kill fee. She told me it was in my best interest that no editor or publisher read my article. Some women have balls; she wasn't one of them.

CALEB:
There's an argument to be made, and Cheney has been making it, that the Iraq invasion helped bring about the Arab Spring.

DAVID:
It's just too easy to play fast and loose with other people's lives like that.

CALEB:
I half agree with you. I can't imagine losing a daughter to a bomb in the name of collateral damage. NPR had a show, “Widows of Afghanistan.” One woman had lost her husband and four children in a missile attack. The entire interview was her bawling.… Hey, this is a nice waterfall. I'm going to take a bunch of pictures.

DAVID:
It's really beautiful. Did you read that book by Samantha Power?

CALEB:
A Problem from Hell
.

DAVID:
She looks at genocide, from Armenia to Bosnia to Rwanda, and how we fail to act. She makes a case that action could prevent atrocity, and I think she's had a huge influence on how Obama—

CALEB:
That could be good or bad. I think a Taliban-type government does not do wonders for their people.

DAVID:
I disagree with Power. The U.S. has a lot of people who need saving. Forty million people don't have health care. I'd rather take all that money overseas and bring it back here. This whole country is in danger of becoming Third World.

CALEB:
America a Third World country? My ass. David Shields, meet Dar es Salaam, Karachi, Manila, and Kampala. Seattle has one homeless for every twenty middle class; Cambodia has one middle class for every twenty dirt-poor quasi-homeless.

DAVID:
You looked that up?

CALEB:
I'm a
World Almanac
guy. The letter of the stat might be off, but the spirit nails it.